TalentSpring: a new way to find job candidates

Hot or Not has gained a huge following on the Web by allowing individuals to rate which people they find most attractive.

Now, a Redmond startup is trying to do the same thing for job seekers.

Bryan Starbuck, a 10-year programming veteran at Microsoft, is introducing a new online service Friday called TalentSpring that allows job seekers to rank other candidates based on the quality of their resumes.

Bryan Starbuck

Operating secretively for the past eight months under the code name NimbleBee, the site lets job seekers rank other people’s resumes side-by-side to determine who is the best pediatric nurse, database engineer or marketing manager.

The idea is that those people who work in a chosen field — say accounting or law — are much more qualified to determine which people in their line of work look best on paper.

If all goes as planned, Starbuck believes, the most talented people will rise to the top. Meanwhile, those who receive low scores will fall to the bottom of the stack.

In both cases, Starbuck said, employers will benefit by more quickly finding the skill set and experience level needed for a specific job.

Employers will pay an annual subscription fee of $5,895 for unlimited access to the site or pay $195 to fill just one position.

While the online job category is estimated at about $6 billion, it is dominated by behemoths such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Yahoo’s HotJobs.

In recent years, a number of startups have emerged — Indeed, Simply Hired and Jobster to name a few — with new tools that attempt to transform the way job candidates find opportunities.

With all of the clutter in the online recruiting marketplace, TalentSpring faces major hurdles in attracting job seekers.

That’s a challenge that most new Internet businesses face, but it is especially problematic for TalentSpring because the value of its rating system depends on large numbers of participants.

Starbuck, 35, recognizes that as a big stumbling block, but he was cagey on how the company might address the issue.

He said he has some unique ideas on how to quickly build the audience, though he declined to offer specifics.

“I would never enter this space unless I had a completely different way to go. And I think this is a very different model,” he said.

TalentSpring, which has raised $600,000 of a $1.4 million financing round, has enough money in the bank to last through 2008.

And the 10-person startup is running lean, with a cash burn rate of just $30,000 a month.

That means that if TalentSpring signs up five annual subscriptions a month, it can break even. The company has already sold one annual subscription at a discounted rate to an undisclosed customer, Starbuck said.

Christian Anderson, director of corporate communications at Jobster, a Seattle startup that is also developing ways to match job seekers and employers, had not heard of TalentSpring.

But he said the resume rating system sounded interesting, adding that there is “obvious frustration” with the traditional job board model.

Still, Anderson said that relying on job candidates to rank other people in the same field could open up real challenges.

“There is at least a little incentive to game the system,” Anderson said. “You would probably be better off if you voted up the worst resume, such that yours would bubble to the top.”

Starbuck said the technology is designed to root out irregularities, dismissing votes that do not follow general trends.

“If people vote incorrectly, we can spot it,” Starbuck said, adding that a grade can be issued to every voter.

“If a person has a really bad pattern of voting incorrectly for whatever reason, we can then indicate that voting score.”

Job seekers who arrive at TalentSpring rank 12 pairs of resumes in a specific niche, selecting which candidate looks better. Starbuck estimates that it will take about 30 minutes to complete the ranking process, which he doesn’t believe will discourage people from participating, since they are motivated to see how they compare with others in the field.

Starbuck said he came up with the idea for TalentSpring after becoming frustrated with trying to hire people at Microsoft.

Looking to fill a dozen engineering positions, he recalled spending hours sorting through preselected resumes in which the candidates all turned out to be mediocre.

“I kept finding this brick wall that I couldn’t get past,” Starbuck said, adding that recruiting continues to be a needle in a haystack proposition.